Today’s quantum devices are noisy, so reducing circuit size is critical for reliable execution. Existing rule-based optimizers often rely on large rule sets that are difficult to manage and still miss long-distance transformations. We present QSymb, a framework for synthesizing compact and expressive quantum-circuit rewrite rules with formal guarantees. We formalize symbolic rewrite rules in which a symbolic gate represents infinitely many subcircuits. We then define canonical symbolic rules of the form L ; S = S ; R and prove that they constitute a compact generative core from which general symbolic rules can be derived. On top of this formal foundation, given a gate set, QSymb synthesizes (1) a small, non-derivable concrete rule set that is complete up to chosen size and qubit bounds, and (2) a small but expressive canonical symbolic rule set that captures transformations beyond finite or monomial-only patterns. We further present rule anchoring to derive optimization-effective rules from canonical symbolic rules. Together, these results provide both expressiveness and guarantees: soundness of synthesized rules via validation, non-derivability, and bounded completeness. On the IBM-Eagle gate set, QSymb strictly outperforms state-of-the-art rewrite-based optimizers (Qiskit, Guoq, Quartz, TKET, and Queso) in two-qubit-gate reduction on 90%, 67%, 82%, 85%, and 83% of standard quantum algorithm benchmarks, respectively; on Nam gate set, the corresponding rates are 88%, 74%, 81%, 86%, and 82.9%. It achieves final average two-qubit-gate reductions of 27.44% and 29.95%, respectively.

@article{paperbot12097,
  title = {Synthesis of Compact and Expressive Quantum-Circuit Optimizations},
  author = {Wei Qiang and Ronghui Gu},
  journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages},
  volume = {10},
  number = {OOPSLA2},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.1145/3839450}
}